Coder's Guild Mailing List

Re: Need help for an algorithm

Posted by Frank Hale on 1999-03-18

> 
> I would post my code but it will only serve to confuse the question
> more. Trust me the code is sloppy and downright unreadable at this point
> in the game.
> 

Okay here is the code I have so far I shortened it up a bit to
illustrate my problem. I am way out in left field and can't seem to
understand the way I need to write this algorithm

# Iterate through each element in the DELETE_INDEX hash.
foreach $DI (keys %DELETE_INDEX)
{   
    # If the element's data equals 1 then we need to delete this record.
    if ($userdata{$DELETE_INDEX{$DI}} == 1) 
    {
        # For each line in the file do something with that data.
        foreach $line (@headers)
        {
            # If the line equals i: then we have the index
            if (substr($line,0,2) eq "i:") { 

                # store this records index in $index
                $index = substr($line,2);

                # If this is true we keep the record.   
                if (not $index == $DI) {
            
                    print "<br>index = ".$index."<br>";
                } 
            }   
        } 
    } 
} 

Sample output on 4 records goes like this. If I delete records 1 and 2 I
get the following output

index = 2 

index = 3 

index = 4 

index = 1 

index = 3 

index = 4 

This describes how my algorithm writes to the file multiple times but it
did delete the records I wanted but it did it over multiple iterations
continuing to write back to the file screwing it up.

As you can see I am pretty lost on this. If someone could offer any
psuedo-code for the type of algorithm I need I would really appreciate
it. Thanks.

-- 
From:      Frank Hale
Email:     frankhale@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xxx   
ICQ:       7205161          
Website:   http://www.franksstuff.com